Film A + Film B = History

walking in the rain can be so magical. looking at the wavy reflections of lights in the slick blacktop, it’s as if there’s no horizon and i’m moving through outer space. i’m stepping on solid street, but as part of a kaleidoscope of keen neon brightness and ink dark, sharp color and blur, all washed in a sheen or film of glistening. the extra strings of lights some stores wear for yuletide seem all the more cheery for being part of this generalized neo-impressionist light-show.

i’m walking with a few others who take this route as a ritual together, after seeing film previews at a private screening room downtown. i’m all for personal ritual, ‘tho i’m here strictly by accident — or am i?

i was getting a replacement for my lost library card at the mechanic’s institute library. i’m a lifetime member of this, the first educational body in the san francisco bay area. before there was a university of california, a university of san francisco, a san francisco state, city college, etc., a bunch of people got together, after the gold rush boom had gone bust, and formed a communalist venture for exploration of new civic avenues of economic livelihood as well as their mutual self-improvement. the night i’m there happens to be the annual members’ holiday party, and i wander upstairs to take in the sensations. where the speaker’s podium would be, a harpist is rendering all the seasonal favorites. at the other end of the double room, behind the wooden bar, volunteers are selling wine, just behind the healthy line for the capacious free cheese spread. so i set my day-weary bones down at a table, after five hours of errands, and proceed to dine on the take-out left-overs from my chinese lunch. as i do so, my mental apparatus automatically tunes in on the conversation of two gals who’ve since joined my table: one is asking the other, ‘what’s the name of that film about the two sisters, one is a cellist?’ (‘hilary and jackie, [1998]’ my mental librarian notes, and my attention moves back to my mustard greens.)

ten minutes later, as i’m finishing dinner, they’re still talking about movies. i get up and mingle. the same group of distinguished looking matrons and dapper gents has been sitting by the door since I got there, so I pay my respects. after the smiles are passed around, i try breaking the ice with, ‘ read anything good lately? ’

the candid reply: ‘ i come here for the movies.’ everyone concurs. one says she can find titles in the collection she wouldn’t have known about otherwise. heads all nod happily. and they’re all staunch regulars of what they call the friday night screenings.

i’m taken back, in my memory, to something my literary mentor once told me, one afternoon, over 30 years ago, in his sunny russian hill dining room. ‘richard brautigan, the novelist, says that when people get together today they no longer talk about books they’ve read, but rather movies they’ve seen.’ he’d said this, as, for years, he and i and his wife were always talking about films we’d seen. i even bumped into them once at a screening of bergman’s sawdust and tinsel (1953) and joined them. he, a pulitzer-prize winner, yet preferred to talk about films and filmmakers rather than books and authors.

fast-forwarding back to the present, i see now that brautigan’s premise gets an update: not only has print been replaced in the everyday discourse but it’s not just the latest film that’s fair game but any film, since all the films of yesteryear have been reincarnating and lining up in tape and now digital format.

here i’ve given myself extra time this year, after 30 years, to return to reading for pleasure, since my writing life has subsumed so much of my time. this year, i directed amazing movies in my head as i communed with william faulkner’s immense postage-stamp-sized human universe known as yoknatawpha county (say ‘YOK-nuh-pu-TAW-fuh’), mississipi: flags in the dust (1929), the sound and the fury (1929), as i lay dying (1930), sanctuary (1931), light in august (1932) — and finished absalom, absalom! (1936) just two weeks ago, which still feels as if i’d just personally seen and experienced it all.

i excuse myself from the denizens of the doorway and stagger away, off to another side of the room, to greet the arrival of the young man who presents the friday night movies here. he’s with a young gal i recognize from the bookshelves of the neighborhood thrift store, who’s telling him they doesn’t have much time. ‘what’s up!’ i offer, and they ask me if i’m going to see the divingbell and the butterfly (2007). a friend of mine in the book industry had mentioned it last week before going to london on a publishing consultation. i’m not on any list for tonight’s screening but i’m welcome to tag along, and i’m game.

a block and a half away, we’re settling in at the de luxe loge chairs of the screening room, sharing the simple joys of pleasant wit and friendly repartee, when the lights dim, and an old french ballad is crooned over stills of greyish x-rays, with credits cleverly placed in pleasing crooks of elbow, along femur, etc. it’s a slightly bizarre juxtaposition, of romantic sound and clinical sight, and slides me totally into what’s to be discovered next.

it’s not clear at all what’s going on, as the film begins. in fact, the image is so blurry, it’s hard to make out the human forms from a clump of pink roses off on the right of the screen.

i’ll just say as little possible at this point, since anything else would spoil it for you, if you haven’t seen it. (we intend, at a future date, to explore, in and of itself, the phenomenon of film spoilage.) the camera, at the film begins, has taken the place of the narrator, as has seldom been done, and never as successfully as now. what follows is:

a film about saying what it means to be human. no more, no less.

(we intend return to this film, in depth. for now, enough to call it Film A. Period.)

afterwards, we’re walking the rain, talking about the film, and i’m thinking back, instead, to the last film i saw. Film B. whereas i had absolutely no preconcpetions or prior background as to Film A , this one had advance publicity already blowing in its sails, wherein i read the director saying it is a film about consciousness.

how interesting, i mused, that i’d just seen a second film about consciousness, back to back, completely by accident (or was it?).

the first film i didn’t care for, personally, and the second film held me entire, all of a piece. they couldn’t make more of an instructive, fruitful contrast. (we intend, at some future point, to explore Film B, which, for now, is enough to say is called youth without youth (2007). Period.)

by this point, it was just two of us walking in the rain, and now our paths diverged and i was walking uphill alone. and it occurred to me how all my life i’d been seeing films in this way: one film in relation to the previous one.

were i to keep a diary of all the films i’d seen, what would interest me, at this moment, is not so much what i thought of any particular one, but how i learned from
one to the next. in sequence.

[ question : 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. ... ? or other sequences? nonlinear series? etc.]

even when all films are finally digitized and available in an eternal library, 24x7, something new, out now, just released (whether shot on film or digital), will always emerge from who knows where to rearrange the whole sequence.

the sheer existence in the present of something new potentially recontextualizes all films of the past. (the future affects the past, which affects the present.)

were we to believe in evolution as tending towards something better, better than what had come before, better than this, (rather than evolution as merely the eternal survival of the survivors), then surely film furnishes a reflection of that evolving; call it world-spirit, zeitgeist, self-overcoming, awakening, or just consciousness.

winston churchill called history one (damned) thing after another. history, which, like change itself, we cannot see, only its manifestations. (what was life like, back when, much less now?)

film furnishes a window onto history, and any serious, critical examination of 'what is film' must include history, whether the window looks outwards, to events in the world, or inwards, to the life of the mind.

certainly, for me, as a conscious filmgoer, it may be no accident, then, for me to have seen two films back-to-back that, like the intrinsic grammar of film (shot A + shot B) , provided two slides for comparison (film A ... film B). for, unless one is merely a delivery device for popcorn consumption, movies as a narcotic, in a media addiction to the latest fix, film must inevitably, integrally reflect conscious life, what anyone values in their common wealth, that in which one invests one’s attention in life.

as i turned the corner to my street, the analogy of music came to mind, another fourth-dimensional (4d) art form. i was reminded how music exists in between notes: where there's no interval, no music. the ear automatically hears Note A + Note B + Note C as a triad, not as separate notes, because it hears the relation between.

and yet even one single note, or just one film, can include all the others, i realized, watching my footsteps in the rain, heading home, just as a single drop of water contains the same water as the entire ocean. one in all.

and so, on this night, was planted the seed of a phenomenology of film, in a furrow of my brain, sparked by a seemingly chance encounter with a completely unknown film.

laying my pencil down, having written “unknown film” i thought those words a fitting place to end this night, at the doorway to the realm of morpheus, dreams, and more still more of the still as yet unknown




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keywords: mechanic’s institute library, scaphandre et le papillon, the divingbell and the butterfly, youth without youth, william faulkner, richard brautigan, winston churchill, avatamsaka (hua yen, flower garland, kegon)